I recently received my monthly edition of Reason magazine. Reason is a great source of articles from writers and journalists dedicated to preserving and expanding freedom in America. Their articles are detailed but easy to understand and serve no political party, just the pursuit of freedom. Each issue has its share of instances where our government, at all levels, is out of control and the politicians that run it are out of touch with reality, often making for some humorous but tragic wastes of taxpayer money and resources.
Below I have picked out some of these examples for you to laugh at and cry about:
- Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote about the bagel situation in the state of New York. Apparently, in New York state if you go to a bagel shop and buy a bagel, it will cost you $.08 more if the bagel shop slices the bagel in half for you. The $.08, of course, goes to the state government in a form of a tax for your convenience of having a sliced bagel. More confusing, if you eat an unsliced bagel at home it is untaxed but if you eat that same unsliced bagel while still in the bagel shop you are subject to tax. Thus, to avoid bagel taxation in New York state you should never ask the bagel shop to slice it for you or dare to eat a whole bagel while still in the shop.
- The same article goes on to point out that in several states, if you purchase a Hershey chocolate bar you have to pay tax on the purchase. However, if you purchase a Kit Kat bar, another type of candy which is covered in chocolate you do not have to pay tax because the Kit Kat bar has flour in it.
Both of these situations are examples of out of control government. These stupid rules take up valuable time and energy from business owners who have to understand and implement these requirements, time and energy that could be better spent serving their customers, expanding their businesses and maybe actually hiring more workers, reducing the high unemployment rate in this country. And who is responsible for these out of control government regulations? It is the out of touch politicians who concoct these stupid rules and laws with no sensitivity or experience on how the waste ripples through the economic system, hurting everyone in the process. Madness.
- The Milwaukee school system had to lay off hundreds of its teachers due to a budget shortfall. At about the same time, the teachers union had taken the school board to court. The reason for the suit? To force the school system's health insurance plan to cover ED drugs for teachers. The school board estimates that the benefit would cost about $786,000 a year. How many more teachers would have to be laid off, and how many kids would suffer as a result, if the school board actually loses this case? More madness.
- We have done this type of economic stimulus math before but a short article by Peter Suderman updates the numbers and confirms our previous math exercise. According to the Department of Energy's reports, it spent $1.9 billion of the stimulus money it received to create 10,018 jobs, resulting in a cost per job created of $194,213 per job. Since the wages of most of these jobs were probably far less than $194,213, we see yet another example of what a dismal and insane failure Obama's economic stimulus plan was. However, this is probably a best case scenario. Mr. Suderman goes on to explain that "jobs created" is probably a misnomer. As the economic stimulus money was spent and jobs were not "created," the administration solved the problem by just changing the definition of jobs created. That category was expanded to include new full time jobs created, new temporary jobs created, jobs saved, and the most ludicrous of all, "lives touched."
Thus, many of the 10,018 jobs created in the Energy Department could have included people who worked on an Energy project for two hours. That situation was given the same weight as if an unemployed American was given a 40 hour a week job. Seems the politicians were spending more time on concocting job definitions than actually creating jobs. Even our usually out of control government recognized the insanity with the Federal General Accounting Office calling the Energy Department's job estimates unclear, problematic, confusing, and potentially misleading. No kidding. When government calls the bluff on itself you know it is madness you are dealing with.
- The United States government has maintained a ridiculous trade embargo with the island nation of Cuba for about 50 years in an attempt to force Fidel Castro from power. However, 50 years later, Castro is still in power, many of the Presidents who continued the embargo are themselves dead, the United States deprives itself of a good sized economic market right off its shores, and the Cuban people have lived in poverty for 50 years, especially since the fall of the Iron Curtain when the support from Russia dropped dramatically. Typical U.S. government program: never ending, never accomplishing its goals, and the people of both countries worse off for the experience.
Why is stopping the trade embargo an important step? First, the United States should never condemn a group of people to a live of poverty because of who is ruling them. Second, as pointed out in this edition of Reason magazine by Ms. Mangu-Ward, opening the Cuban market to American goods and services could lead to American farmers annually exporting over $360 million a year of American food crops to the island, in the process feeding a hungry nation. It is madness that this has not happened.
- Talk about true madness, consider another article by Peter Suderman. This one concerns the health care reform package that Obama forced through the back door of reconciliation in the spring and the fact that a new Congressional Research Services (CRS) report stated that it is impossible to count or estimate the number of new government entities, boards, commissions, and organizations that will be created as a result of the legislation. Talk about out of control. Even the government cannot now estimate how big it will become as a result of politicians being out of touch with the root causes of rising health care costs. Specifically, the CRS reported that "the precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created pursuant to PPACA (i.e. Obama care) is currently unknowable."
The report went on to say that it is unclear how the General Accounting Office will be able to audit the new creations, it is impossible to determine how much power many of the new entities will have, and it is currently impossible to know how much influence the new organizations will have. Again, this is Congress talking about itself. We have created an out of control government monster with this legislation that is self reproducing, eating up taxpayer resources without solving any problems. The worst part of this monster is that many in the government bureaucracy and the political class will be part of the problem but no one will be accountable for the tragic results.
- If the latest CSR report shows an out of control government, then Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is the perfect example of an out of touch politician. If experts in the Congressional Research Service cannot explain what is going on in the health care reform legislation after an extensive study, what chance does a single bureaucrat like Sebelius have of explaining everything going on as a result of the legislation? If Nancy Pelosi, who helped ram the bill's approval through, has publicly stated that we will not know everything in the bill until it was passed, a truly ignorant statement for a politician to say for a piece of legislation he or she is advocating for, how will anyone else know?
Apparently, however, Ms. Sebelius has got it all figured out since she was recently quoted as stating: "We have a lot of re-education to do" as it pertains to the legislation. If she has an education plan ready to go, maybe she should start over at the CSR since they have not figured it out yet, despite their best efforts. Madness.
- One last example of out of touch politicians, people who never understand the ramifications of their actions. The health care reform legislation is one example, an attempt to fix a problem spawns out of control government control and bureaucracy, among other catastrophes. A Reason magazine report by Brian Doherty discussed the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Mr. Doherty, the out of pocket costs for these two conflicts has so far reached about $800 billion. Thus, each American family, on average, has paid about $7,000 each to support both war efforts, $7,000 that could have been spent within the economy, contributing to economic growth and employment growth.
However, the $800 billion is just the current operating cost. According to the article, two economic and financial experts from Harvard and Columbia universities have estimated the true cost over time to the American public of both wars closer to three TRILLION dollars. Their analysis shows that the country was still paying for the effects of the first world up until about 1965 and for the second world war up until about 1980 as veterans and disabled soldiers needed to be cared for and interest payments on borrowed money spent to execute the wars was paid off. Just another example of out of touch politicians rushing off to do something without understanding the root cause and the true cost to the Treasury and the country's taxpayers.
Silly and sad at the same time. Just these few examples illustrate how, in a wide set of fields, we have allowed our political class, which has no grounding in reality, to create madness and an out of control government that results in lost freedom, wasted money, and non-solved problems. Besides stopping the Cuban embargo, other steps such as term limits that remove out of touch politicians before they can do real damage and a step that would implement procedures to punish existing politicians for the out of control and non-effective government programs they create are needed to stop the madness.
However, it is up to us to stop this madness by electing leaders, not politicians, regardless of what party they are from, that can understand all of the implications of complex problems and their proposed solutions, that can look at stupidity (e.g. Kit Kat is not taxable, a Hershey bar is taxable, a sliced bagel is treated one way, and unsliced another way) and say enough with the madness, and who have the fortitude an courage to focus on real issues affecting real American families. Until then, Reason magazine will continue to have endless material to talk about, material that unfortunately reduces our freedom every day
iAutoblog the premier autoblogger software
沒有留言:
張貼留言